


Horatio

by thesearchforbluejello



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, and he thinks about Heidegger which makes him slightly less of a basic white boy, beta-canon compliant, except for the fact that Mark is still a philosopher here, specifically the funeral, spoilers for Full Circle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 12:16:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17203253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: It's a soft June morning that they hold the public services for Kathryn's funeral. Mark reflects as he waits for Phoebe to speak.





	Horatio

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote 80% of this last December and then abandoned it because I couldn't seem to adjust the weak spots in a way that satisfied me. This piece isn't compliant with with my series, but it is compliant with and a sort of tag to Full Circle and the canon of the Relaunch novels.

Carla had been the messenger. 

He'd been surprised when she had told him; surprised that the inevitable had come to pass so soon, surprised that reality continued around them, surprised that the seemingly indomitable Kathryn Janeway was gone, death having come for her in all its finality.

Carla had cried. They'd been silent for a long while, and then, as it was wont to do, the surprise had faded. Life had continued. Commitments held them in a firm and unrelenting grasp of familiarity. 

It hadn't been until now that Mark had felt the true and utter shock of reality seeping into his bones like a poison. There is a brief respite between speakers and Mark feels the metal of the chair digging into his back. The June air moves softly in a breeze around them. Birds twitter somewhere nearby. Carla sits silently beside him. Mark thinks vaguely of Heidegger and Husserl and lets time slip through the grasp of his perception like a length of silk.

Phoebe is standing by the podium, blue eyes and red hair and Mark thinks of what she told him. She knew when Kathryn died, she'd said. She'd felt it shift the nature of her subjective reality, a hitching in the transition from a time in which Kathryn was alive into a time when Kathryn existed not as a tangible person but as a collection of memories woven into a coherence only stitched together by a set of labels borne of her relationships to others-- friend, sister, love-- rather than an independent whole.

He hadn’t believed Phoebe, at first. Surely she hadn't known.

It's guilt, he reflects, that had made him dismiss her so readily. An event as incredible as the death of Kathryn Janeway should have been marked by a seismic shift in reality; objective reality, his subjective reality-- whichever or whatever truth dormant behind perception should have warped in some tangible way. 

The universe couldn't possibly remain so unchanged. But it had.

_There are more things, Horatio._

It's this dissonance that’s continuing to feed his shock, discordance with what he feels and what he thinks he should feel. He had already lost Kathryn once and had years to practice becoming accustomed to her death. There was no proof before, of course, just silence echoing in the vacuum of space until Voyager was acknowledged of being gone. It had taken time, as all things do, but he had stopped waiting for her to come home, stopped expecting Starfleet to contact him, a hurried messenger telling him she was home. Molly had stopped waiting by the door. 

It was a shallow thing, this time around, hearing that she was dead. The shock now comes not from the news itself but rather from the realization that her death means so little against the indifferent backdrop of creation and destruction that fuels the grinding wheels of the ever-turning universe. 

 

When he'd found out that she was still alive, it was easy to explain away the lack of that profound change he’d expected; she wasn’t really dead, so it hadn’t happened like he’d expected it to. But this time, this time they know it’s true and that she’s really gone. But truth is relative, and Mark struggles to believe that truth or death or time or memory is absolute. 

Change, it seems to Mark, is the only thing that approaches absolute. Change is a self-sustaining reaction. He wants to feel this as a comfort. He doesn't.

He loved her, once.

He still does, in some part of himself. Carla knows this, but it has never stood between them. He hates himself some days, now, for not having loved her more, and for loving Carla in the same safe, easy way. He is not destroyed by Kathryn's death. He didn't wait for her then, when Voyager had vanished and been dismissed as lost. He won't wait for her now. He wonders if the same sort of ebbing surprise will accompany Carla's death one day. The consideration rises unbidden to his mind, and he hates himself for it.

Phoebe takes the podium, and Mark does not know that another change is about to be set in motion.

He looks down the row of seats without meaning to, the flow of time suddenly grating uncomfortably against his awareness of it. His eyes land on Chakotay and a twisting sort of jealousy snakes around in his gut, giving something else to hate himself for.

Mark always saw Kathryn when she stood a middle ground. He knew her, but he didn't know all of her. He realizes, as Phoebe prepares to speak, that Chakotay saw Kathryn in a way he himself never did. He saw her at her worst, and that was the toll that must be paid to have seen her at her best. Mark knew her well enough to see the glint of steel in her when he pushed her too far, when he'd tried to convince her to move in with him at first, then the first time he'd tried to convince her to marry him, too soon. He knew her well enough to see a streak of cruelty in her, in cutting remarks she made, in aggressive responses to challenges. Never to him, though, not in all the time they were together. Because they'd never been close enough for that.

He'll remember her as better than she was, and conversely he'll remember her as less than she was, a picture just a shade less than technicolor. He won't be able to stop himself from putting her on a pedestal and suddenly he knows this. Time has the ultimate power of erosion, and he is powerless in the face of that profundity.

Phoebe raises her head to speak and the moment grinds to a halt. The speeches have been generic, bordering on a sort of military sterility. Kathryn's memory already stands on its pedestal, and Mark struggles to accept that perhaps the only person who can see through that illusion is Chakotay, who is staring beyond the monument as if it doesn't tower over them, casting a shadow over the ground like a sundial bearing an eternal, guttering flame at its top in an ironic commentary on time.

What Mark remembers of Kathryn is true in the most subjective sense. What Phoebe remembers of Kathryn is true in the same way. What Chakotay remembers of Kathryn is also true. Everyone whose life she touched, everyone who holds a memory of her holds a piece, a flawed facet, of the collective truth that was once Kathryn Janeway. Mark hopes that those fractals will preserve her more completely and more accurately than Starfleet's bleached sentiments.

He wrestles with these thoughts, struggling against the languid movement of the moment, the unsteady progression of subjective time, until Phoebe begins to speak and her words shatter around him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Drop me a line here or on my tumblr to let me know what you thought! I've got more stuff coming up soon, so stay tuned.


End file.
